Yahoo!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Alright, so I´m just going to jump right into it...the big news for this week is that MATIAS GOT BAPTISED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh man, it was like the best day of my life. It was seriously sooooo cool to see. He actually got baptised after church because he has like barely an hour free on Saturdays in between work but it was incredible. He had his mom and grandma there with him and of course his girl friend and some of her family and also a young couple who is about to have their first baby who are friends of his. He told me he was a little nervous as I was talking to him before it started but it was kinda of a cool contrast because I talked to him at the end and asked, "how do you feel now?" and he said, "like a new person." ahh, it was just too cool. The baptismal service went really well, we had some nice talks by people and watched a cool video on the book of mormon while they were changing but I think my favorite part is that after we had a little time for people to bear their testimonies and his girlfriends mom got up and kinda told the story of how she got to know Matias and his family and just bore her testimony and I think it really touched Matias mom and grandma because afterwards they were just bawling haha. The last song we sang was "I know that my Redeemer lives" and the spirit was there really strong for that too. We´re hoping Matias is going to be the example for his family and that someday they´ll get baptised too. After it was over he was hugging his mom and they were both crying and you could tell they felt the spirit and I´m just way excited to see what will happen with that family. All because of a 16 year old girl mind you. I went up and congratulated him after it was all over and he just kept saying thank you and he just seemed really grateful and it was just awesome. He´s going to be such a stud.

President Avila even came because he talked to Matias on the phone once and we had talked with him about Matias´ situation. President is such a loving man, it´s incredible. He just takes time to make people feel appreciated. The other day after he had been in a meeting all morning and most of the afternoon with trainers showing them the new training program he came back to the offices and went by everyone´s office and just kinda sat down and talked for 10 minutes. And like yesterday he could have gone to church with his family but he showed his support and love for Matias by going to church in San Ignacio. He took the time to talk to a lot of people there too. He´s just a really genuine person. His wife is really cool too. We don´t get to know her very well because she´s not in the offices as much (she as three kids still in school) but when she´s in her she´s way fun to joke around with. They are both really really cool people.

Besides that not a ton happened this week. I got all of the registros in which is a relief although it was frustrating because soooo many were incomplete and I had to make calls and bug people for information and there was just a lot of stuff that came up but now it´s over and I´m stress free haha. The beta version of the oficial Mision Mendoza Store was tested this week and....everything turned out surprisingly well. We had about 100 compras made in an hour and the financero told me it was going to save him about 7 hours of work so that makes all the work I put in seem worth while. Now I´m working on putting all of the error messages and stuff in Spanish because the Materialista (who is the one who deals with all the materials...if you didn´t figure that one out) is usually a latin and the program does little good if they can´t understand it. I´m also working on adding a part that we can use when people buy stuff away from the offices. For example for zone conference the missionaries will call up and ask for everything they want to buy and then when president and the assitants go they will bring all of that stuff. So we´re going to have some kinda order sheet so we can keep track of what stuff we need to get ready and we´ll pring that and then they can sign it saying they actually got what they asked for and when we get that sheet back we´ll just click a little box and it´ll automatically transfer the compra from the order list to the bought list. Just some fun stuff.

Sometimes there´s some pretty funny miscommunication in the offices. It´s definitely an interesting bilingual atmosphere. One conversation that I overheard this week was Elder Packer talking to President. Elder Packer pretty much always will talk in nothing but English and somehow expect that they´ll understand (which is funny because sometimes he uses words that there´s no way their going to know) and Hermana Packer usually uses a Spanglish mix where some words will be english and some words will be Spanish. Anyways, Elder Packer was leaving and he said to President, "I´m going home to cook some dinner" and President in response said, "Gracias, igualmente" which Elder Packer thought was a proper response to his statement. If any of you remember that email a while back where I talked about that word, you´ll know that basically what President said was, "Thanks, you too" -- which doesn´t exactly make sense with "I´m going to go home and cook dinner" haha. It´s also been fun because my companion is trying really hard to learn English but sometimes says funny things and then I translate it what he said into Spanish and he just starts cracking up because he realizes how silly it sounds haha. For example, he was trying to say "My ears need to get used to [hearing] English" and instead he said "I need to get used to my ear." We had a good laugh about that.

Alright family. That´s about all I got for now. I´m going to go play some soccer and hopefully do a bunch of cañazos (nutmegs) and badly embarrass some people.

With all the love of a dinosaur,

Elder Lounsbury